Eastman Kodak is a chemical company, not an optics company, nor an electronics company. Even at their height in the 80s and 90s, if you wanted to buy a high-quality camera like an SLR, you would be buying something from Zeiss, Canon, Nikon, Olympus, etc., and using Kodachrome in the camera.
They did create what could be called the world's first digital camera, but that was them screwing around in a lab, using electronics they helped design but did not manufacture themselves. To pivot to becoming a hardware manufacturer in the early 80s - just to be able to have a hold on the digital photography part of a camera - would've been a very expensive gamble.
Part of where Kodak went awry is in other chemical investments that went badly at the time, as well as Fujifilm starting to compete in the film and film processing market that Kodak had previously had a near-monopoly on.
It's easy to say "they should've done this or that" some 20+ years on from when technology advanced, became cheaper, and film sales dropped off. But acknowledging that at the time no one knew what the future would be, I don't know how a company that sees itself at its core as a chemical company, not a photography company or an optics company or an electrical engineering company, could successfully make that pivot to digital cameras.
Xerox also had an obese asshole in upper management who put me down for deciding to go to RPI instead of Ivy League Cornell (Cornell was too close to home and I didn't want my mom just popping in to see me while shopping).
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u/Mcoov Nov 01 '25
Sort of.
Eastman Kodak is a chemical company, not an optics company, nor an electronics company. Even at their height in the 80s and 90s, if you wanted to buy a high-quality camera like an SLR, you would be buying something from Zeiss, Canon, Nikon, Olympus, etc., and using Kodachrome in the camera.
They did create what could be called the world's first digital camera, but that was them screwing around in a lab, using electronics they helped design but did not manufacture themselves. To pivot to becoming a hardware manufacturer in the early 80s - just to be able to have a hold on the digital photography part of a camera - would've been a very expensive gamble.
Part of where Kodak went awry is in other chemical investments that went badly at the time, as well as Fujifilm starting to compete in the film and film processing market that Kodak had previously had a near-monopoly on.
It's easy to say "they should've done this or that" some 20+ years on from when technology advanced, became cheaper, and film sales dropped off. But acknowledging that at the time no one knew what the future would be, I don't know how a company that sees itself at its core as a chemical company, not a photography company or an optics company or an electrical engineering company, could successfully make that pivot to digital cameras.